Printing services have long provided a means of enlarging photographs and printing them as posters. With the advent of the Internet, conventional enlargement of photographs and printing of posters has become an electronic business through the use of a global collection of computer networks and gateways that allow communication between computers via high-speed data communication lines between major nodes or host computers. Web sites for electronic poster-producing businesses may be accessed on the World Wide Web (“the Web”), via conventional software and hardware such as a Web browser, in order to obtain information regarding sizes and prices of posters. Image files may then be submitted to the electronic poster producer via electronic mail or via computer-readable media sent by ordinary post.
It will be appreciated that prior electronic poster-producing processes such as those described above are limited in their flexibility and make only limited use of the potential of a global computer network such as the Internet.